Tonight I Said Goodbye (St. Martin's Minotaur Mystery) (13 page)

In February, he took a great step toward his dream when he acquired three lots of prime property from a man named Dan Beckley, who owned a small restaurant, a gift shop, and a parking lot in the Flats. Beckley had initially balked at the idea of selling out to Hubbard, but he settled a few weeks later, apparently for much less than his initial asking price. Hubbard already owned some of the adjoining property, and he was now much closer to his goal. His next mission was to acquire property on either side of his current holdings. To the north, his property was bordered by a seafood restaurant that was pricey, well known, and always busy. It wouldn't be an easy deal for
anyone to swing, even Hubbard. To the south, Hubbard's land met a strip bar called The River Wild: A Gentlemen's Club. It had been in existence for about six years, and the owner reportedly was making a good profit and had no interest in selling. The bar had received some unfavorable publicity a few years back, when an underage and intoxicated kid wandered away from his fraternity brothers, fell off the deck, and drowned in the river. It hadn't hurt the club's business, though. Nothing generates a steady cash flow quite like lap dances, apparently.

The newspaper reported February meetings between Hubbard and the owners of both the seafood restaurant and the strip bar, but negotiations hadn't gone well. Hubbard accused the owners of "outlandish" asking prices; the owners said if Hubbard didn't want to put up the cash, he was out of luck, because they were in no rush to sell. At the end of the month, it was still a stalemate.

Joe and I learned all this studying Amy's faxes early in the morning. Cody's visit the night before had effectively put an end to our surveillance of the Russians, but there was no reason to stop moving on Hubbard. We decided to begin by talking with Dan Beckley.

I made a few phone calls and learned that Beckley had purchased a laundry and dry-cleaning operation in Middleburg Heights after selling out to Hubbard. He apparently had an office in the back. We drove to Middleburg Heights.

Beckley's shop--E-Zee Kleen--was in a small strip mall on the west side of Pearl Road, just past the Bagley Road intersection. I pulled the truck into the lot and parked while Joe stared at the sign and sighed.

"What the hell is the matter with people?" he said.

"What?"

"E-Zee Kleen? Can you tell me what the point of that is? Is there a reason he can't spell it correctly?"

"It has more pizzazz that way," I said. "Catchier."

He gave me a withering look. "Spare me."

We went inside. Two women were loading laundry into the washing
machines, and a short Chinese man was at the counter, talking in an agitated voice with the clerk, a bored-looking middle-aged woman. Joe and I stood behind him, waiting. He was ranting about a rip that had appeared in a suit he'd left to be dry-cleaned. The clerk was explaining that she couldn't help him if he didn't have a receipt and the supposed damage had occurred six months earlier, as he said. This was not the response he'd been seeking, and he let her know that for about five minutes while Joe and I grew increasingly impatient. Eventually, Joe cleared his throat and spoke over the man.

"We're here to see Dan Beckley. Is he around?"

The clerk nodded her head at the door behind her. "He's in the office, but he might be on the phone. Go on in, though."

The Chinese man turned to us and glared at Joe. "Excuse you for interrupting. I was talking."

Joe stared at him. "No," he said, "you were babbling." Then he walked around the counter and opened the door.

I looked at the outraged man and shrugged. "He's not a morning person," I said. "But, then again, not so much of an afternoon or evening person, either."

I followed Joe into the office. It was a small, square room, occupied by an old metal desk and one filing cabinet. A tiny television sat on the filing cabinet, tuned to a morning talk show. The room smelled of beer and body odor. A large, ruddy man with fat cheeks and small, sunken eyes sat behind the desk. He wore a plaid shirt, with the first few buttons undone, revealing a thin gold chain amid a cluster of gray chest hair.

"You here about the dryer?" he asked.

Joe shook his head. "No."

The man sighed. "Figures. Those sons of bitches have been promising to come out here for days, and they still haven't showed. Meanwhile I got only four dryers that work. Sucks." Joe looked at him blankly and didn't say anything. The man said, "So what do you want?"

"You Dan Beckley?"

"That's right. Who wants to know?"

I looked at Joe. Who wants to know? There are some things that sound cool when said by Robert DeNiro that sound ridiculous when said by anyone else. Joe gave Beckley our business card, and he looked at it and then dropped it on his desk.

"I figured this day was going to suck," he said. "What's the problem?"

"No problem," Joe said. "We just wanted to talk to you."

"About?"

"About Jeremiah Hubbard."

Beckley screwed up his face like he'd tasted something foul. "I got nothing to say about Hubbard."

"You sold a fair amount of property to him not too long ago," I said. "Originally, you told him you weren't interested. Then you reconsidered, and from what we've heard, you didn't make out too well on the deal. What happened?"

"What happened? Nothing happened." He crossed his arms over his ample stomach. "I decided to sell, that's all."

I nodded. "I see. You ever hear of a guy named Wayne Weston?"

He frowned. "No."

"He's an associate of Hubbard's," I said. "An investigator, like us. He was murdered about a week ago."

Something changed in Beckley's face--not when I mentioned the murder, but a split second earlier when I told him Weston was an investigator.

"I don't watch the news shows much," he said. "I don't care to hear about murders and drug wars and the rest of that crap. And I never heard of this Weston guy, either." He tilted his chin up at us, defiant.

"Why'd you reconsider on the property deal?" Joe asked. "There has to be some reason. A guy like Hubbard has plenty of money. You probably could have taken him for a lot more than you did."

"I made out fine on that deal," he said. "Just fine, thank you. I got what I wanted to get, and I moved on. I don't see why it's any concern of yours."

Sometimes you just feel it. Call it a hunch, a gut reaction, intuition, an instinct--sometimes you can feel the truth in a way that's hard to explain, a deep, subconscious tug that tells you when something doesn't feel right. As I stood in Beckley's office and watched him glaring at us, with his arms folded over his stomach and his shoulders pulled back in a defensive posture, I had that tug.

"What'd Hubbard have on you?" I asked softly.

He jerked his head back as if I'd given him a jab on the chin. "What did you say?"

"What'd he have on you?" I repeated. It was his reaction to my description of Weston as an investigator that had given me the tug. Somehow, that had made something click in his mind; it had explained something he'd wondered about in the past.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said.

Joe took a half step backward, an almost unnoticeable movement, but he was clearing out of the way, realizing that I was operating on a feeling he didn't share.

"Dan," I said, "do us both a favor and don't bullshit me."

"I'd like you to leave. Now." He pointed at the door.

"We're not leaving, Dan," I said, my voice still soft. "You didn't sell out so low to Hubbard just because you felt like it. You're too smart for that. You'd look at Hubbard, think about how deep his pockets are, and you'd bleed every cent you could out of him. Every last cent. Now why didn't you?"

"Go to hell."

I ignored him and leaned forward, placing my palms on his desk and lowering my face toward his.

"Listen to me, Dan. There are two ways of handling this. You can either tell me what Hubbard had on you, or you can let me find it out on my own. One way or the other, I'm going to get the information. And I don't like being lied to. You're lying to me now, and until I find out what you're lying about, I'm going to make you my life's work. You're going to be my obsession, Dan. I'm not going away."

He looked up at me, and the defiant chin quivered slightly. He breathed heavily out of his nose and clenched his hands together. Angry. Then he pulled open one of the desk drawers, removed an envelope, and threw it at me. It hit me in the chest and fell to the floor.

"Go on," he said, his lip curling up in a snarl, spitting the words at me. "Go on and take a look."

I retrieved the envelope from the floor and opened it. There were photographs inside. I went through them slowly while Joe looked over my shoulder. In the first picture, Dan Beckley was in a car, talking to a woman on the sidewalk who wore stiletto heels and a short red skirt with black fishnet stockings. In the next, he was passing her money, and then she was in the car, her head buried in his lap. In the final photograph, she was out of the car again, walking away, while Beckley sat in the driver's seat.

I slipped the photographs back into the envelope. "So that's how it went," I said. "Hubbard sent you photographs of you with the hooker, and you made the deal?"

He shook his head. "Can't prove it was him. All I got were the photographs and a little Post-it note with the price he'd offered me written on it. The message was pretty clear, though." He looked down at the desk. "I got a wife and a son. I didn't want them seeing that shit."

"Did you call Hubbard on it," Joe asked, "or did you just agree to the deal?"

"I didn't call him out, but we both knew what was going on."

I dropped the envelope back on his desk. "Thanks for your time, Dan. And don't worry, this isn't going to leave the room."

He flipped me off and kept his eyes on the desk. Joe and I left. The Chinese man was still yammering at the clerk, who looked ready to strangle him. He shut up when Joe brushed against him, but he was back at it when we reached the door.

We sat in the truck, and I started the engine but didn't shift out of park.

"So that's what Weston was doing for him," I said. "No wonder the guy has such good luck with business deals."

"Explains why Weston didn't appear to be a legitimate investigator," Joe said. "He was just a well-paid extortionist. Hubbard probably gave him plenty of business."

"If Weston had been doing this for a while, it would add to the list of people who'd have liked to kill him."

"What about the Russians?" Joe said.

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. "Yes. What about the Russians?"

We sat there for a while, and then I said, "We could go back to Hubbard, confront him with it, and see what he gives us."

Joe shook his head. "I don't like that. Not yet, at least."

"All right. So what now?"

"Back to the office. Let's take another look at those faxes from Amy and see who else Hubbard might have been putting the squeeze on. Then we'll give Agent Cody a call."

I pulled out of the lot and started to drive, then realized Joe was looking at me.

"What?" I asked.

"Just thinking about you pushing Beckley back there," he said. "You've got some kind of instincts, LP."

"Lucky guess," I said.

Back at the office, the telephone message indicator was blinking. Joe checked the voice mail while I browsed through the faxes from Amy, writing down all the names she'd associated with Hubbard in recent months. I had a list of seven names by the time Joe hung up the phone. His face was thoughtful.

"Who was it?"

"Cody," he said. "He had his guys check the plate on that green Oldsmobile we saw yesterday."

"Yeah?"

"Plate's not registered to the car."

"It'd be too easy if it were. Maybe I should ask the Russians for the VIN number. They've been eager to help me so far."

He frowned. "I don't think this guy is with them. Why's he camped outside their house if they're associates? You ask me, he's working against them in some capacity. And he's definitely interested in Weston."

"Makes you wonder, doesn't it."

"Uh-huh." He tapped a pencil on the desk and stared at the wall. "The plate was reported stolen from South Carolina, though. Two days ago, Cody said, in Myrtle Beach. That's a hell of a drive."

"If he drove. Could have stolen the plate beforehand, then flown up here, rented a car, and swapped the plates to cover himself."

"Now why's a guy from Myrtle Beach come to Cleveland with a phony badge to question Weston's neighbors? And how the hell does he know about the Russians? Even if he flew in, according to the license plate he couldn't have been here for more than two days. So we can assume he knew about the Russians beforehand."

"Knew what?"

He shrugged. "Something, anyhow. He's asking the neighbors about the night of Weston's death. Why?"

"Another investigator?"

"Who's he working for, then?"

I sighed and shook my head. I didn't have any answers. A dull ache had crept into my shoulders, and I rolled them slightly, trying to relieve the tension. I needed a good workout, or maybe a massage.